[MUSIC]

Welcome to week three of Exploring the Beethoven

Piano Sonatas.
If we can get through today's lecture
together,
then we will be past the midway point.
In 1802, Beethoven wrote a letter to one
Wenzel Krumpholz, of all extraordinarily
named people, in which he said, "From now on I am going to take a new path."
One could argue that few statements in the
history of music have
had more import than this one, as once
Beethoven determined that he
would remove his one remaining foot from
the past, from the style
and norms of the second half of the 18th
century, once he
determined that the conventions of the
early classical style were not for him
anymore, his music began to undergo
changes that had a huge ripple
effect--tsunami effect, I guess.
Really, once Beethoven began to question the
foundations
on which his early works were based, the
history of music itself changed course.
This can be seen as the beginning of the
more than
long, more than century long dismantling
of first the classical style,
then the sonata form, and finally of the
tonal system itself.
Now interestingly this "new paths" remark of
Beethoven's
must have been well known to 19th-century
composers.
When Schumann wrote his famous 1853
article announcing his discovery
of a still unknown Brahms, he also called
it "Neue Bahnen"--new paths.
It speaks volumes that the Romantic
generation not only imitated Beethoven's music,
they even copied his speech patterns.
I've always been slightly surprised by the
timing of the letter however.
Beethoven wrote it shortly before he wrote
the three piano sonatas Opus 31.
While each of these does have certain
structural
innovations, the four sonatas he wrote
immediately preceding the
new paths remark strike me as being the
ones that mark a clear break with the
past.
As I've mentioned, dividing Beethoven's
music into period is
a fool's errand because in each work there
is invariably
something that's new.
But this is to my ear the clearest

demarcation point he ever gives us.

The first 13 sonatas, which were the
subject of last week's
lecture, create, reach a kind of a
culmination point with the Sonata Opus 22.
It's the only sonata of Beethoven I
can think
of which conforms precisely to a model he has
already established.
And it really is notably reminiscent of
the very first sonatas, the Opus 2s.
And also of Opus 7, which, frankly, I find
more compelling.
Opus 22 is brilliant in its faster
movements.
It has a kind of an operatic beauty in
its slow movement and, and throughout
it's, it's impeccably wrought.
But whenever I play it, I find there's
just the slightest sense of routine about
it.
For the record, now, Beethoven disagreed
with me.
He was inordinately fond of Opus 22,
having written to his publisher that,
"diese Sonata hat sich gewaschen."
It's an untranslatable idiom which means something
like, the bee's knees.
Maybe what I sense in it is not so much
routine but
self-satisfaction, which Beethoven did not
typically allow himself the luxury of.
Anyway, the sonatas up until this point,
despite plenty of
variety among them, have all stuck to a
certain model.
Each four-movement sonata has featured a
sonata allegro followed by a truly slow
movement-an adagio, not an andante, as Haydn and
Mozart often
used--then a minuet or scherzo, and then
finally a rondo.
Whereas the three-movement sonatas have
invariably followed the Mozartian pattern.
And regardless of the total number of
movements, every
sonata has begun with a movement in sonata
form.
So Beethoven has to this point taken an
established model, tweaked it slightly,
and perfected the tweaked version.
Having done so, he will now proceed to,
essentially, reject it and
not just for the moment but really for the
rest of his compositional life.
The four sonatas that first find
Beethoven veering off the path are
the Sonata Opus 26, the two Sonatas quasi
una fantasia, Opus 27,

and the so-called "Pastoral" Sonata, Opus 28.

They are written in short succession,
the first dating from the tail end of
1800,
the last completed already by the end of
1801.
Now, interestingly only a few months
separate the conservative Opus 22 and the
forward-looking Opus 26 as well.
Since it clearly wasn't the passage of
time that changed him,
we probably never will know what motivated
this stylistic u-turn.
Opus 26 breaks ground in, really, many
ways.
But the most obvious thing is that for the
first time Beethoven eschews sonata form
for the first movement.
In fact, none of the four movements are
sonata forms.
Now this is a very big deal.
Among the hundreds of three- and four-movement works
that Haydn and Mozart wrote and that
Beethoven had
written up to this point, I can think of
exactly three that do not begin with a
sonata form.
And each case it was an experimental work.
And in each case, the specific
experiment was not repeated.
For Beethoven, though, Opus 26 becomes the
first of a series.
Some of the later sonatas, really even,
arguably, the next two,
are outwardly more radical, but Opus 26
is pretty extraordinary in that it is
probably
the only one out of all 32 that makes no
effort to unify the movements.
Or put another way, he throws out the old
system, and replaces it with nothing.
I suppose there is a bit of a pattern
here. The first and the third movements of
Opus 26
are fairly lengthy and they're both on the
slow
side, the second and fourth movements are
quick and brief.
So, in a sense the sonata is composed of
two
pairs of movements, two go-arounds of
first tension and then release,
though, the first and third movements
otherwise have absolute zero in
common with one another.
This slow-fast-slow-fast construction
makes the work a bit of a throwback, as
Baroque sonatas, such as the Bach gamba
sonatas, for
example, often had the same succession of

tempi.
The similarity, though, ends there.
If anything, Opus 26 looks forward, not
backward.
In Schumann's unusually critical review of
Chopin's second
sonata, he complained that Chopin had not
really
written a sonata at all, but rather had,
"united four of his most unruly
children."
In many ways, the same comment--I would
not
personally deem it a criticism--applies
to Beethoven's Opus 26.
In the case of both the Beethoven and the
Chopin, it's not cohesion, but the
imagination on display and the inarguably
high quality
of the material that makes the works
distinguished.
Or rather, the cohesion of the work cannot
be explained by examining the structure,
or fishing around
for motivic connections between the
movements. There simply
is an emotional logic to the succession of
events-another link between this sonata and
the Romantic era, which sometimes valued
feeling over form.
And the comparison of Opus 26 to the Chopin
sonata
is really a pertinent one for other
reasons as well.
While Chopin was pretty much alone among
the top-shelf composers of the 19thcentury in that he didn't like Beethoven
and didn't admit to being influenced by
him,
he did like this particular sonata.
And as we will see shortly, part of the
work
clearly took up residence in Chopin's
head.
So, having abandoned the sonata form for
the first movement,
Beethoven instead gives us a series of
variations in a leisurely tempo.
This does have certain precedence.
Haydn occasionally began his two-movement
sonatas with slow variations.
But honestly, his two-movement works
really constitute a genre unto themselves.
They don't belong to a discussion of
Beethoven and the piano sonata.
Mozart began his "Alla Turca Sonata: with a
set of variations, but that sonata
is a set of unruly children if ever there
was one in the Classical period.

Really, the first movement's form is only

one of many rules it is the exception to.
And again, none of the experiments were
ever repeated.
So really, these variations, they're a
brave new world.
Now other than bringing the element of
surprise,
simply because it really hadn't been done
before,
what does it mean, practically, that the
first movement
is a set of variations rather than a
sonata form?
This is the question that we will begin
exploring in the next segment.
Let's take a short break for a review question.